


The Road to Babylon

by heartofthesunrise



Category: LeATHERMØUTH, My Chemical Romance, Reggie and the Full Effect
Genre: Complicated Relationships, Conventional Weapons Era, Frangst (Frank Angst), M/M, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-07
Updated: 2017-10-07
Packaged: 2019-01-10 00:14:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12287199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartofthesunrise/pseuds/heartofthesunrise
Summary: The studio, as it always was, was rife with discomfort - disagreements, embarrassments over the way they’d forgotten how to play with each other - and yet it impressed upon Frank again and again what was missing. He left the studio every day exhausted, but… Curiously absent was that old heartache, the pang of creation._In which Gerard hates everything he writes, Ray is coddling him through it, and Frank is coming to terms with the fact that MCR is the most important thing he'll ever do, and that he's not the frontman. A story about the building and dismantling of Conventional Weapons, and how much James and Frank hate LA, but love each other.





	The Road to Babylon

**Author's Note:**

> Many, many liberties taken with the canon events surrounding Conventional Weapons. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ Courteously beta'd by trojie. 
> 
> Written for Bandom Big Bang 2017 and [stunningly podficced by trojie here!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12287298)

How I wish, how I wish you were here  
_We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl_ _  
_ Year after year

_-Pink Floyd, 1975_

 

_Summer, 2009_

_June_

Frank hated LA. Goes to show he was the only guy in the band with enough integrity to stay in Jersey. The tarmac at the airport even seemed brighter, more aggressive on his eyeballs, than Newark had. It roasted beneath the California sun.

Bob had gotten there from Chicago a couple days earlier and had volunteered to pick him up, and when Frank got to the airport he was there with a crude little cardboard sign that just said "frank" on it, just like that, all lowercase. Frank wormed his way into Bob's arms and put his face in the crook of Bob's neck and stayed like that.

He hated LA, but it was good to be there.

Bob was crashing at Patrick Stump’s LA house. Through some strange effort, Bob had maintained a friendship with the Warped Tour crowd that none of the rest of the band had put much effort into. Maybe Mikey, but then, Mikey had always been the best of any of them at networking. Frank, his cynicism having long since driven off the acquaintances with whom he might’ve couch-surfed for a little while, was renting - site unseen - a one-bedroom apartment in North Hollywood that he already hated. It had come furnished in sterile hotel-room whites and browns, and was conveniently located near the studio. And yeah, while he had missed the music and the people and playing like he only could in this band, it was not without a dollop of intestine-deep dread that Frank was regarding the next two months.

But that, as he made himself remember, was a problem for future Frank.

Bob drove them down the Pacific Coast Highway, a detour that brought them hurtling along the perimeter of a the glittering ocean vista. The highway seemed sheared out of something ancient and beautiful - cliffs dropped swiftly away on their left side, so that they might’ve been flying, might’ve been suspended in nothing at all. It was the way the sun made Bob look blonder and Frank look pastier, made the two of them laugh louder. They rolled the windows down and Bob fiddled with the radio dials until he found something he liked - The Spirit of Radio, Frank thought, but he couldn’t be sure under the roaring wind. It could be good, to be here, if he made it good.

Frank wanted to make it good.

They pulled off the highway somewhere in Malibu and got back on heading south this time, driving now with purpose. Bob never seemed lost anywhere, always seemed to have a map in his head. It was probably, Frank reflected, a side-effect of having crewed for so long before joining up with a band. His easy comfort in his own discomfort. They took an exit towards Santa Monica and then got on another highway, this time headed away from the ocean, towards Gerard’s house where they’d all be getting together to have dinner.

Bob rolled the windows up halfway, reducing the noise fractionally, and they chatted about small things: the idle things they both did to keep busy; the records they’d liked in the last year; whether or not Bob was still allowed to call his physical therapy “hippie bullshit” when it seemed to actually sort of be paying off.

“Hey, that’s great, dude,” Frank said, slugging Bob fraternally on the shoulder. “Y’know it’s weird to see you take care of yourself.”

They both laughed. Bob took the next exit down into Highland Park and wound through a series of culs-de-sac. Frank looked at him in the decaying light and acknowledged within himself the uncomfortable, foreign presence of hope lodged under his ribs. This time… This time, it could be different.

"I'm glad you're here," Bob said as they pulled up in front of Gerard's house. "I think he's gone crazy. Or, y'know, crazier than usual."

"Hey," Frank said, raising his hands helplessly. "I'm not the one who reigns him in. You want that, you gotta talk to Toro."

Bob smiled, one of his little half-way smiles like he was trying not to let his mouth get away from him. Those ones meant more to Frank sometimes.

They walked up the drive together, and Ray answered the door and gathered Frank into one of those hugs you can only get from Ray, and only after you haven’t seen him in a little while, genuine and bone-crushing and warm. Mikey and Gerard were in the kitchen - a disaster waiting to happen - being minded by an exceptionally patient Lindsey and Bandit. The lot of them had dinner on the patio and watched the slow setting of the sun and talked about the band, about the way they’d want to do it:

“It’s not gonna be like last time,” Gerard said, and he sounded sure of himself. Here, lit in lavender and ochre from the smoggy sunset, Gerard looked like… An adult. He held his sleeping daughter in his arms, held dominion over this beautiful house, this unconquerable city.

Frank turned a glass of wine in his palm, examined the inky back of his other hand resting on the arm of his chair. Wondered how long it would take him to catch up.

He had the whole summer to find out.

*

Their studio was a thing of beauty. Not so much in its architectural majesty or even its stately, efficient design - it was, in fact, squat and somewhat ugly from the outside, and slap-dashedly soundproofed with egg carton foam and particle board on the inside - but it belonged entirely to them. It was built on what was inarguably their legacy, and it provided them with complete artistic freedom to do what they wanted, and what they must.

It couldn’t be the studio’s fault, then, that everything had been going to shit since day one.

The thing was, Ray sounded beautiful, and he wasn't satisfied. Mikey had never been more on with his bass parts, and he felt good about it, but seemed to understand whatever strange alchemy made Gerard turn off every song they demoed halfway through the first listen, disgusted.

Frank watched Gerard run both hands through his hair and stare up at the ceiling.

"Maybe we came back too soon," Gerard said tonelessly. "This is garbage."

Mikey perched on his bass amp. "It's not garbage, it's just not. Y'know."

They all knew.

Gerard paced moodily from the mic stand to the desk and back, and then to the door where he lingered, waiting, until Ray collected him under one heavy arm and they left to have one of their talks.

Frank looked around at Mikey, who seemed non-plussed, plucking out an atonal series of notes on his unamplified bass, and then at Bob, who had his forehead pressed to the skin of his snare, doubled over in exasperation. Bob, whose hands might not hold up for an extended period of writing and recording and scrapping everything they came up with that seemed to hold any water.

"D'you think we're gonna be able to use any of this?" Bob said finally. It reverberated, percussive and strange against his snare.

"Y'know Gerard likes to recycle," Mikey said. He hadn't looked up from his bass, and was fingering scales slowly up and down the neck. "We'll find a place for the stuff that's good, and the stuff that's not, we shouldn't keep anyway."

And then it was Bob's turn to get up and wander out, not waiting for anybody to try to talk him down. This was Frank’s area of expertise. It was something Frank had always taken as a bit of a personal mission, appointing himself captain of band morale, at least where Bob Bryar was concerned. And if he seemed antagonistic, well, it was an antagonism born from love and respect.

"You gonna take care of it?" Mikey asked from his seat on the amp stack. Mikey, who would of course be the one to know just how Frank operated, just what his priorities were.

"Guess so," Frank said. He got up and put his guitar aside and followed the path he thought Bob would take, outside to the studio loading dock, where there was nothing to look at but the flat, bleached out carapace of Los Angeles all around them.

Frank pulled out two cigarettes and lit one, tucking the other behind his ear. Bob already had one in hand. It seemed like such an east coast affect, a cold climate lifeline. Frank exhaled a thin stream of smoke.

"You look like you're two seconds away from quitting," Frank said.

Bob looked at his cigarette. "I couldn't." A beat. "Oh, you mean the band?"

Frank nodded.

Bob took a long drag on the cigarette. "I guess I don't know," he said finally. "I just." He was laconic at the best of times, and Frank knew him well enough, could see the wheels turning behind his very blue eyes as he searched for the right words, the ones that would get his meaning across the most economically. "I didn't think it would be like this." 

Which was fair. Frank hadn't, either, but he was, he reflected, in it for the long haul. He thought about what he and Bob had both given up to be here, and what they'd both gained, so much fortune and fame it seemed absurd to try to measure it. He knew Bob struggled with wanting that more than Frank did.

"It's not like it was easy the last time around," Frank said. He took a drag. "I don't know what you were expecting, but it's never... I mean he's never made it easy, that's why he's so good at what he does. He makes it matter."

Bob nodded. "I would've done this... I mean, the last record? I would've done it for free."

"You did enough work for free already, Bryar."

They both laughed, remembering a simpler time, a European tour where all that seemed to matter was the crowds and the songs and the occasional sandwich.

"I don't know what you guys want from me, now, I guess." Bob blinked against the sunshine. He looked paler, more insubstantial out here in the California light. The blond thatch of hair that swung down over his forehead and the sun-freckled bridge of his nose were overexposed, rendered colorless under the relentless sun. He'd lost the lip ring somewhere along the way and Frank missed it acutely for a moment, the way they'd had them on opposite sides, the way they both used to look more like they belonged in a punk rock band. At least Frank still had tattoos.

"Bob, when are you gonna..." Frank hesitated. "It's not what we want from you, it's what all of us want from what we're making. You're part of the band, you know."

"Am I?"

Even in Bob's soft, interesting voice, it came out sharp and harsh and Frank nearly recoiled at it.

"Yes," he said, affronted. "Bob, of course you are."

Neither of them spoke for a long moment. They finished their cigarettes, and Frank lit his second, and they shared it between them in a tradition they'd established on some nothing tour, back before Bob was in the band for real, back before they had to carry the weight of all this bounty.

 

_Winter, 2008_  

On the plastic tabletop, Frank's phone vibrated. It was strange and exhilarating to be on the road without Gerard carrying the show, without Ray, but it was a relief to know he wasn't entirely without them. The text said "throat coat" all in lowercase. Gerard's advice when Frank complained to him about the strain Leathermouth put on his voice. The phone buzzed again. "Proud of you, man."

The other side of the table was a mess of coffee cups and crumpled receipts all shoved to the sides to accommodate the two octave MicroKorg James kept on the bus to practice, that he was playing on stage more and more these days. He had headphones in and was leaning back behind the keys, his long hands splayed over them. It was strange to watch him with the sound off, his elegant fingers spidering over the keys with purpose, his gaze fixed and focused somewhere above Frank's head. There was the tinny afterimage of synthesizer bleats leaking out from James's headphones, so faint Frank couldn't make out what he was playing. Instead he listened to the rhythmic plastic clack of the keys being depressed and then released.

James stopped, shook out his left wrist. Frowned.

"What?" Frank asked, and James pulled the headphones down to hang around his neck.

"I can't get the left hand to Up on the Roof right," he said.

The fact that James still practiced Matt Pryor's old songs on the road bore down on Frank.

The show that night had been exactly like all the others, populated by a baffling combination of old Reggie fans, who seemed at once glad to see James back at the front of the stage and confused by his record, his attitude, the various ways he'd changed... And Franks' half of the crowd, which was composed almost entirely of teenyboppers in My Chem t-shirts whose expressions ranged from confused to devastated seeing this side of Frank. And it wasn't... He'd never hidden this part of himself. He'd been in bands with Hambone long before My Chem had started. He was the four-on-the-floor punk rock heartbeat of the band.

It was something he carried with him always, the version of himself gritty with sweat and dirt, sharp in the pit and blunt with his instrument. This was the purest version of his artistic self, something instinctive and feral and kept wild. It's what overtook him onstage with My Chem, allowed him to fall to the floor and kick his legs out and thrash the way the kids loved to watch.

But when he did that, and Gerard was there, the rest of the band was there, he felt like he was a piece of something important. It was an impossible pill to swallow, this concrete realization that people were coming out to his shows because they wanted to hear Ray and Gerard's songs.

Across the table, James had unplugged his headphones and Frank could hear the twinkly midi piano coming from the onboard speakers. It was familiar - after a minute Frank recognized it as that old Get Up Kids track. The little trill that was so James, and the melody that was so James and Matt together.

"That one mean something special to you?" he asked. It seemed like a personal question, with the two of them uncharacteristically alone this late at night.

James gave a one-shouldered shrug. "Y'know we're doing a show together? This spring. Like a reunion."

Frank stared at him. "No kidding?"

James nodded. "Back home," he said. "It's on my birthday, actually."

Frank waited for him to continue, but he let his hand wander over the little riff to "Up on the Roof," slower and slower until he came to rest on a chord.

"You okay?" Frank asked.

James shrugged again, that same lift and drop of his left shoulder. "I miss them, y'know?" he said finally. "We're gonna play the record front to back, film it, the whole thing."

He didn't have to specify which record. In the years since they had met, since they had grown so close, Frank sometimes forgot that James had come into his life fully formed. Looking back at himself on their first tour together Frank was embryonic, ideas only beginning to coalesce into a person with an identity. James had, in point of fact, already _been_ a part of Frank's life before they'd met. He'd made a record with a pair of slouching, impossibly human robots on the cover and changed Frank's topography forever.

When the Get Up Kids had split and James had been sent adrift he’d been newly divorced, a mess, an addict. Matt Pryor had written a vicious record about how they'd stayed together too long, had let their wounds fester and rot. Frank remembered James on the first tour after he'd gotten clean, and how quiet he'd been, and how everyone hadn't quite known what to do with him. And here he was, across the table from Frank, playing an old B-Side he'd written with Matt when they were just starting out, loyal to a fault.

He thought about the kids with tickets to their next show, who'd be hoping to see the guy they loved from My Chemical Romance, who wanted to save their lives. How profoundly disinterested he was in saving anyone but himself.

Across the table from him, a vision of his future: a guy with a brilliant, raw, inspiring record no one wanted to hear and a reunion gig coming up with the thing he was gonna be known for forever. In five years it'd be Frank headlining a tour, playing his songs to people who'd rather hear someone else's.

 

  _Summer, 2009_

_June, continued_

Gerard hated these songs with the a petulance that he knew was unbecoming. He would write a verse, would conform to all the rules he had penciled into his head, would sing it, would be immediately put off by everything about it. And he could see the mounting exasperation in everybody’s faces and couldn’t force himself to acquiesce.

So he would leave, and because Ray was Ray, and they both were the way they were, Ray would follow him out and talk him down. Today they were crammed into the studio kitchenette, leaning together in the corner beside the burbling coffee pot, the rest of the band waiting in the studio for them to come back and try again.

"I hate it," Gerard was saying, both hands fisted and resting against Ray's chest. "It doesn't sound like us, and it's not, I mean it doesn't fucking mean anything -"

"Hey," Ray said, getting an arm around Gerard's shoulders and bringing him closer in. "We've always written, you know, a little bit of garbage before the good comes out. It's okay, Gee, it's okay to be rusty."

Gerard was silent for a long moment. "It was just never... It's never felt this hard, not with… Not with you."

Ray buried his nose in Gerard's hair. If Frank were there he would've made merciless fun of them, of the strange intimacy that writing together brought out of them. "But it's not always easy," he said, and he put his hand on the side of Gerard's face and leaned down to kiss him on each eyelid. "We don't have to do this right now," he said. "We can take time, we can -"

"I want to get it... I want to finish it," Gerard said. He sounded childish in his own ears. "I want to not have it looming over us so we can just..." He didn't know how to finish, and Ray, who had a thousand small reassurances for Gerard's neuroses catalogued in his mind for easy access, didn't know how to tell him he shouldn't think of it that way.

"We could leave it for now," he said slowly.

"We can't! The label won't get off my ass about it, I don't -"

"The label can suck my dick," Ray said easily. "You have a kid, Gee, you get to take time off if you want it."

Gerard considered this, burrowing closer to Ray's chest, giving in to the instinctual need to be held and comforted when he felt things spiraling outside of his grasp. "When I'm home I feel guilty for not being here, and when I'm here I wish I was home," he said, and Ray had to duck his head to hear him. "And when I'm here everything I come up with sounds like something somebody else already wrote, so what's the point."

There was no answer to that. Ray leaned up to tuck the top of Gerard's head under his chin and hold him there for a while. It was the best he could do.

*

It was always a matter of momentum with them.

Frank was chugging through the changes, locked in with Ray, with Mikey and Bob. It almost reminded him of the way they’d used to jam together while they were touring Revenge, only between then and now Frank had learned a few things, and Mikey had managed - against all odds - to actually figure out how to play the bass.

The motifs they were jamming on weren’t anything special, but they were _fun,_ which seemed more important. Even Gerard was hanging off the mic stand, grinning, improvising some vocal runs, warming  up. Frank watched as he took the microphone in hand and wandered over to lean his full weight on Mikey, sending them both stumbling, laughing.

As the jam found its natural cadence and the five of them stopped playing, Brendan inched open the door and peered in.

“You sound good, guys,” he said amiably. “Maybe we can take another pass at ‘Surrender’ if you’re up to it?”

And Frank was, he was itching to put something to tape, to feel this momentum carry them through the rest of the record. He exchanged an assured smile with Ray.

“I was thinking,” Gerard said, in a tone that made Frank’s stomach curdle. “Maybe we scrap that one, actually?

As laboriously as it had been built, the good feeling that had suffused them a few minutes ago seemed to take no effort at all to dissipate. Gerard was leaning on the wall beside Mikey, his brows drawn together like he couldn’t even see what he was doing.

“Like… completely?” Bob asked. “I thought you liked that middle eight, we could save that and put it somewhere else.”

Gerard shook his head. “I listened to a few of the takes on the way here and I just don’t think it’s right.” He looked at Ray. “Right?” Then at Frank. “I mean, you hear it, right?”

Frank glanced uneasily around the room. “Not… not really, Geeway. Like, I don’t think we have the right mix yet for sure but do you really want to just toss it?”

Gerard scrubbed his hair out of his face. “I’m not trying to be a diva here, guys,” he said, dismayed.

“Hey,” Brendan said. He was using his cajoling voice, the one he’d developed early on to try to circumvent the bruising pressure of Gerard freaking out. “How ‘bout we run through it one more time, I’ll get some clean tracks, and then you can decide later if you want to keep it. So, you have it if you need it.”

Gerard deflated. “You guys think I’m just being difficult.”

And it was Ray who took it upon himself to save the situation, because of course it was. Who else could?

He set his guitar down and moved over to Gerard and gathered him up in a hug.

“Gerard, you _are_ being difficult,” he said around a laugh. “Just give it one go, and we can listen to it and make the call then. Okay?”

Gerard sagged into Ray’s arms. “Okay,” he said finally. “Okay, okay.”

They played through the song, each trying to give it their all, trying to provide whatever missing ingredient would make Gerard happy with it. Frank was getting desperate to be reassured, to have one song for this album completed and set in stone, unshakeable. He studied Gerard’s face as they listened to the rough mix, and found no comfort in it.

“I’m glad we have it,” Gerard said finally, pulling the headphones down around his neck. “In case we need it later. But I don’t know, guys, I just don’t think it’s a lock.”

Stalled in traffic on the freeway later that evening, Frank beat his palms against the steering wheel in frustration. He had a burned copy of ‘Surrender’ on the passenger’s seat beside him and he wrestled it out of its case and snapped the disc in half at a red light. It was good, it sounded good, but he knew better than to think anything would come of it.  

*

That night, Frank sprawled out in bed. It was a perfectly serviceable apartment and the furniture was mostly alright, but the bed was meant to be a comfort to his increasingly unstable back. It was, he reflected, the only wholly positive part of the city of Los Angeles.

With effort, he tugged his phone out of his pocket and thumbed through his contacts.

"Frankie?" When James answered his voice was thick with sleep, gravely, even more so than usual.

"Ah jeez, it's late there."

"Three in the morning."

Frank put the call on speakerphone and opened up his web browser, dug his credit card out of his other pocket.

"It was miserable at the studio today," Frank said, untroubled. He was more afraid of Danika being annoyed with him than James - James never slept anyway, and Danika was infinitely scarier, all pedigreed Long Island punk to James's midwestern sweetness.

"What happened?" James asked. In the background Frank thought he could hear him getting up, shuffling out of the bedroom. He could perfectly envision James's darkened house, and the route he'd take to the place where he did all his late-night thinking: the piano bench, by the window, where he could look out at the pool and have a moment to himself.

Frank relayed the dismal points of the day to him, still thumbing around on his phone browser.

"That sucks, man," James said.

"I wish you were here," Frank told him. "You'd help, I bet."

The sound of James scrubbing his palm over his mouth. "I'm not joining the band, Frankie," he said uneasily. "You know that."

It stung, more so because it wasn't what Frank was trying to say at all. "No, I mean. I'm about to buy you a plane ticket. For you to come visit."

"What?" James said, sounding more awake. "There's like, shit you're supposed to... We should schedule, you should talk to... The manager? You're supposed to be recording an album!"

"It's like, in the cart, dude," Frank said. He tapped the checkout button. "I'm doing it. You're just gonna have to make it work."

James floundered on the other end of the phone. Finally, he asked: "Why?"

There were a lot of true answers: because playing with you makes me think differently, and we should all be thinking differently with this record; because Gerard's being impossible and Ray's enabling him and you're the only person amiable enough to tell them without getting fired; because I fucking miss you, okay?

“Because you should be here,” Frank said instead. “And what’s the point of being rich if I can’t do this?”

He could nearly hear the downturn of James’s lips, that vague frown that so rarely pulled at his mouth.

“I won’t, if you don’t want me to,” Frank said, wanting to plead, not knowing how.

From the other end of the line the heavy night air seemed to ebb against the receiver.

“No, no, I’ll come,” James said finally. “When’s the flight?”

Frank clicked through checkout. “Not soon enough. I’m emailing you details. Go back to bed.”

*

Patrick Stump’s house was as lifeless as Frank’s apartment, as the temporary homes artists had to maintain tended to be. The primary difference seemed to be Patrick’s willingness to embrace excess in the absence of heart: it was a house furnished with expensive taste, with the obvious input of an interior designer, with a crisp modernity that didn’t suit Bob at all.

It was also outfitted with a bizarrely grown up-seeming wine rack in the open plan kitchen, and of this, Frank and Bob had availed themselves. Although that had started two hours ago, and Frank was now finding himself fantastically, marvelously drunk.

“Y’know he’s got the right idea,” Frank said, gesturing around at the soulless opulence of Patrick’s house. “We shoulda pulled the trigger on a house when Ray moved out here.”

“What, together?” Bob asked. He had the fingers of his left hand wrapped around the neck of a nearly empty bottle of merlot, seemingly contemplating it. He looked up at Frank. “Is your place really that lonely?”

Frank shrugged. There was an unopened bottle - the third of the evening - on the coffee table a few feet away but he didn’t trust himself to get up just yet. “Do I have to be lonely to want you around?” he countered, lifting one careful eyebrow. “Can’t I just want to see you?”

Bob’s face was all wine-ruddy and slack, but he stiffened it into a frown. “We’d see each other. We’re at the studio twelve hours a day, you see more of me than you do of your fancy bed, I bet.”

“Well,” Frank said. He arranged his face into the shape he knew people found irresistable - big eyes hooded, lips parted, soft and sly and maybe a little bit dangerous. “Those things aren’t mutually exclusive.”

Bob cut his eyes to the side to look at Frank, then turned his whole head, and then the rest of him followed, drawn in by the lazy charisma Frank had at some point in his youth managed to harness and put to work. He lounged back on the couch and tilted his chin up, challenging; knowing exactly what he was doing. What he wanted. Bob loomed over him on hands and knees.

“We can’t keep doing this,” he said abruptly.

“This?” Frank said. “Why not?”

“No, not…” Bob trailed off, and lifted one hand enough to gesture between them. “Not this, this is fine, but you know. The album Gerard wants to do. We shouldn’t be trying to do it the way he wants us to.”

Frank blinked several times in rapid succession. Weren’t they supposed to be kissing? “Wait, what?”

_“Sorry,”_ Bob said, sitting back on his heels. He did look sorry. “I just needed to talk to _somebody._ Nobody else is _saying anything.”_

This, Frank realized, was Bob being honest with him, something he typically did only with the application of a fair amount of pressure, and only when it truly mattered. And it was true, that on that first night Gerard had rattled off a set of rules that, though at the time Frank had agreed - no big stories, no costumes, nothing that would send them back to the monochrome gulag of the Black Parade - he now felt collared by, held perfectly still by the same bulleted list that was meant to propel them into motion.

“It always gets done, B -” Frank started, and barreled through when Bob looked ready to interrupt him. “You usurped me as the new guy in this band, I get to talk down to you a little bit. It always sucks and we always figure it out.”

And yet they had, after two weeks of writing, the seeds of five passable songs. Songs other - _lesser,_ Frank thought maliciously - bands would kill to have on their records. The studio, as it always was, was rife with discomfort - disagreements, embarrassments over the way they’d forgotten how to play with each other - and yet it impressed upon Frank again and again what was missing. He left the studio every day exhausted, but… Curiously absent was that old heartache, the pang of creation.

In the absence of anything helpful to say, Frank reached up and took Bob’s hand.

“Take me to bed,” he said softly, jostling Bob’s hand in his own. “We’ll talk in the morning.”

The moment held, tenuous between them, until Bob leaned up and brushed a whiskery kiss to Frank’s mouth. Then he was helping Frank up, walking him backwards towards the bedroom, kissing him. Frank let himself collapse back onto the bed, tugging Bob down with him, being surrounded by him.

Afterwards, they lay beside one another, sobering in the ambiguous stillness that straddles the gap between the very late night and early morning. Neither of them were sleeping, each caught up in his own thoughts. Frank wriggled down under the covers and pulled Bob’s heavy forearm over his waist and shut his eyes. He couldn’t stop thinking about the desperate sureness in Bob’s voice, couldn’t stop measuring it against his own uncertainties about the record.

He turned onto his side and willed himself to sleep.

*

Several exits down the highway, Gerard couldn’t sleep.

He scrolled back through the entire email thread. The studio had been exhausting, and coming home had been - as it always was - a relief, but Lindsey and Bandit were both asleep and he was wide awake and feeling that thin-skinned itch to create something, and his lyrics were crap, and the music was lifeless, and there was… The seed of an idea, something he’d been kicking around with Shaun since forever ago.

Since Mikey came back to track the last album and had been so changed.

Gerard had been drawing Mikey into his comics since he’d started making them. His old SVA portfolio, which his mother had insisted he keep, was stuffed with sheets of bristol, loosely inked crowd scenes where Mikey was somewhere in the background in his glasses and his tight jeans. He’d written to Shaun with the Mike Milligram character a while ago, and had scrapped it, and kept coming back to it.

Their sporadic emails had tapered off after Lindsey got pregnant but the last message, from Shaun, had said (in its entirety):

G -

We could really do something with this. I have this androids-on-the-lamb love story I think might work. Let’s meet up next time you’re in Jersey.

And of course they hadn’t managed to get it together, because they were the same, shared the same inability to get something going without an instigator to poke them about it. And they’d both been busy in their own channels. And here Gerard was, with an entire sleepless night looming over him and an unsatisfied craving to make something _new_ , and. Why not this? Why not now?

He hammered out a quick email to Shaun:

I’m still thinking about this. I think we should go for it. Send me what you have, if you’re still interested.

Sometimes Gerard worried that his preference for collaborating with people who’d known him before he was famous was going to hold him back. The way he clung so obviously to Ray. Shaun, who’d been in goddamn Pencey Prep.

That, he decided, was a neurosis for Future Gerard.

He dug around in his desk until he found what he needed: a completely empty sketchbook, a handful of brush pens, some markers. He flipped to the first page and wrote MIKE MILLIGRAM in block letters, with the date underneath.

 

_July_

Frank had gotten to the airport early. Too early, early enough that he was pacing at the TSA security hellmouth, checking his phone every other minute, waiting. He had been at it so long that he didn’t see James walk up to him and was thoroughly startled as he was folded into a bear hug.

“Did you draw the short straw?” James asked, leaning back with his arms around Frank so that Frank’s feet lifted entirely off the ground. “I was gonna get a car.”

Frank flailed until James set him down. “No, you fucker, I just _wanted to be here,_ like, y’know, a _friend_ would.” He pulled back enough to get a good look at James: he’d cut his hair not long after they’d finished out Leathermouth, and was still wearing it short. He was clean-shaven. He was smiling his soft, uncomplicated smile. He was an oasis and Frank looked at him until the relief was too overwhelming and he couldn’t anymore. “I can go home and you can get yourself a car, I just thought maybe you’d be happy to see me or something.”

James tousled his hair. “Might as well get a ride with you, since you’re here and all.” He slung his heavy arm over Frank’s shoulders and together they followed the signs towards the baggage claim. “So G’s okay with you fucking off in the middle of the day? Aren’t you guys working on another masterpiece?”

Frank rolled his eyes. “He’s okay with it because it’s _you,_ and I think he thinks if I put out you’ll move out here and play for us full-time.”

James tipped his head back and laughed and laughed.

*

It was late enough in the day that Frank drove them straight home from the airport. As they were leaving the freeway, he handed James his cell phone and had him call out for curry. He was hungry, and he was hungry for James’s company, and he didn’t want to waste time or energy at a restaurant or pretending he’d ever learned how to cook.

Frank’s apartment building had a secure parking garage, and Frank parked in his reserved space and they took the elevator up to the fourth floor, both feeling wrong-footed and strange. Frank was remembering the Christmas party he'd held on the heels of some Leathermouth dates the year before, when his and Jamia's house had been overflowing with old friends and liquor and good cheer. James and Danika had shown up late during the night and worked the room separately, both of them too charismatic to be taken on together.

Eventually James had found Frank, overwhelmed and punch drunk, standing alone in the hallway, and loomed over him, grinning.

"You're missing the party," he'd said softly, leaning down to put his forehead against Frank's. James was free with his affection always, in a way Frank never knew how to be. Ray had been at that party, coincidentally back in Jersey to see his parents, and James had sidled up to where he was standing, unsuspecting under a sprig of poorly-placed mistletoe, and kissed him full on his smiling mouth. They were both like that, both of them soft and affectionate and good with other people.

Frank had looked down at himself under James's scrutiny. He was soft, he had grown softer over the last two years, but he couldn't imagine himself as anything appealing, couldn't shape his body into something that someone would willingly touch.

He had been, he reflected then, immeasurably lucky to know Jamia, who was the same way, who understood and who filled in all his flaws with her kindness, and for whom he tried to do the same.

And yet, standing there in his hallway under James's dark, unserious gaze, Frank had felt... Not desirable, no, but as though he were closer to bridging that gap than he'd ever thought he could be.

"Frankie," James had said, and he'd leaned down and Frank had tilted his head up as if in anticipation of a kiss like a car crash or the pop of a balloon. But James had moved to the side and further, to settle his big head on Frank's shoulder and put both his arms around Frank's waist, and it was almost what he wanted.

Now, standing beside James in the elevator, Frank couldn't help but think about that moment, about how sure he had been that James was going to kiss him, and how much he wanted to be desired by him. They'd stood in a boozey, weirdly intimate embrace for a long moment before James had dragged him back to the party, but the rest of the night Frank had felt strange, sensitized, so that his skin sparked when James brushed by him.

He'd told Jamia about it that night as they were getting ready for bed and she'd given him a fond, condescending look and told him that next time if he wanted to kiss a nice boy he should just do it.

Immeasurably lucky.

"Home sweet I hate Los Angeles," he said to James as they made their way across the threshold of his apartment. It wasn't fancy by any means, it was utilitarian and undecorated, but it had a comfortable couch and a big TV and a coffee maker that brewed twelve cups at a time which, Frank reflected, might be enough to get him and James out of the house in the morning, but not to keep them supplied all day.

"We both know California sucks," James said. He took an orange from the bowl on the counter and peeled it before offering Frank half. "You should try not to let it get to you."

He was right, of course.

"There's all this stuff I’ve been meaning to do here," he said. He didn't even know why he was saying it, only know James looked interested, so he had to keep going. "That maybe you could bully me into actually doing. We could go to Largo tomorrow night. See a show."

"With you?" James wrinkled his nose. "I hate getting mobbed by your fans."

"Nah it's mellow, it's not the My Chem crowd at all," Frank said. "It'll be fun. Come with me."

James tilted his head like he really had to consider it. "Yeah," he said finally. "Okay. Only to keep you out of trouble, though."

"Fair enough."

The buzzer shrilled and Frank stepped out to pay the delivery guy and collect a steaming bag of curry. They ate on the floor

Together they made up the couch with sheets and blankets, and Frank left James with the TV remote because he was a notoriously bad sleeper, and went to bed thinking about the way James had looked at him in his hallway last year, and how in the next room his mouth must taste like citrus and cigarettes.

*

The late sunset spread out over the Pacific in a watercolor splash, lighting all of them up sprawled out on their blankets in palisades park in an extravagant display of tangerine and permanent rose. Lindsey's dark lips stood out in her face. Gerard sat beside her, watching the sunset, observing the way the bump at the bridge of her nose eased gracefully down on either side to her laughing eyes. How she was so beautiful, maybe even more beautiful with the last vestiges of pregnancy weight clinging to her. How at peace she looked with their sleeping daughter crooked confidently in her arms.

On his other side, Ray sat watching the horizon. Despite it all, despite the album and the things he found lacking in his writing, and the way he was able to vocalize, and the music they were making together... It was an embarrassment of riches. To have two incredible soulmates, to be able to keep both of them, to be so sure of himself here between them. Ray, as if sensing his penchant for sentimentality, put out a broad palm and touched him lazily on the side of the head. Gerard leaned into it. He was dizzy with joy before the first flares of a cluster of bottle rockets lit the plum-colored sunset.

The next fireworks shrieked, and Bandit began to fuss in Lindsey's arms, and she passed her over Gerard's lap to Ray, because he was shockingly good at this. They both watched in awe as he held her - their daughter, impossibly small - in his big hands and bounced her until she quieted, then held her and rocked her until she slept. This, Gerard thought, was the perfect family. His incredible wife. His best friend. His best friend's incredible wife. They were complete.

A volley of fireworks burst in the sky out beyond the palisades, and Gerard could hear the faint whooping and laughter of kids on the roads far below. Kids who must have driven over the border to Nevada for the good fireworks, where they were sold at stands on the highway, the same way they were in Pennsylvania, back east.

Gerard slumped over on Ray's shoulder so that they could both gaze, not at the spectacle out beyond the palisades, but at the improbable shape of his daughter in Ray's arms. After a moment Gerard leaned up and kissed Ray clumsily on the side of the face, and they both turned back to the fireworks.

A few feet away, Frank was shivering.

He and James had gone out the night before, had gotten crowded into a little table and seen the Watkins siblings play with Fiona Apple. The music was beautiful. Across the table, James had rolled a glass of seltzer in his palm. They had both been lit gently by the flickering light of a candle in the center of the table. Against the backdrop of the music, and the dim light, and the way it _was_ between them… Frank had breathed in, and thought, “I have a crush on James,” and let himself breathe it out.

Now they were sitting together watching the fireworks, and Frank was fighting the urge to take his hand. The breeze blowing in off the ocean was cool, and Frank shivered again. Beside him, James shrugged out of his hoodie and handed it wordlessly over.

Frank pulled it on. It smelled like cigarettes and sweat, and he pressed his nose into the collar for a moment.

“Thanks,” he said.

James nodded absently. He was watching the low-hanging blooms of pink and blue fireworks far off to the left of them, and as Frank watched him, he tipped over and rested his head on Frank’s shoulder.

In that moment, what Frank wanted, so much, was not even to kiss James, or to take him home and fall into bed with him, or to untangle the complicated knot of feelings in his chest and lay them out for him to observe. More than anything, he wanted… To make a record with James.

And how strange, this longstanding yearning for partnership had finally come to a head here, and now, and… With somebody who refused to join his band.

“Hey,” Frank said, leaning down to speak into James’s ear.

James hummed back at him. “You need your shoulder back?” he asked. He started to shift away.

“No, no, just…” Frank could’ve used a bracing drink just then. “Just, will you come hang out in the studio with us tomorrow? You don’t have to record anything but like, will you come jam?”

James closed his eyes, and opened them slowly, and settled back onto Frank’s shoulder.

“Yeah, Frankie. Okay,” he said.

Beyond them a spatter of purple light blossomed over the horizon. It deepened the shadows cast behind them. Frank tilted his head to rest his cheek on the top of James’s head.

Together, they watched the fireworks.

*

"That's a weird chord change - make it weirder." James was listening through the rough chord changes they’d put together for Kiss the Ring, leaning back behind the Roland Frank had dragged out for him to play.

Frank hadn’t gotten any pushback to bringing James into the studio. Ray had actually pulled him aside and quietly thanked him.

"He's good at this stuff," he'd said, sorting through takeout menus by the studio phone with Frank, trying to find something to order for lunch that they hadn’t already grown sick of. "Plus he's like. Very good at making misery seem like fun. Really, Frankie - thank you."

And it was true that Gerard’s spirits had improved immensely, that he’d been cracking jokes and jotting down lyrics and keeping the mood upbeat for once. It was as though his presence had injected the will to live, and to create, back into the band. Frank felt revitalized.

"Like how?" he asked James, challenging.

James went over to the little Yamaha they kept in the studio that Ray liked to fuck around on and fiddled with some switches until he got a sound he liked, then picked out a few notes before hitting two chords, the first familiar from the song they'd been playing, the second almost the same but stretched out and bizarre, colored with some dissonance Frank couldn't place.

"I like that, what is that?"

"Fuck if I know," James said. "Lemme see." He listed off the notes under his fingers. "I was never any fuckin’ good at jazz chords, call it an A flat nine?"

"Sure," Frank said, laughing. He scribbled it down anyway.

Frank tooled around with the chord, and the one that followed it, and gazed around at his band. Gerard was taking a water break off to the side and telling Mikey something that was making him grin all goofy, all his funny little teeth showing. Ray and Bob were working out some rhythms back by the drum kit, Ray on a borrowed SG and a practice amp, just giving Bob some strum patterns to play under. They were both smiling, having fun.

It could be fun, it didn't have to be all doom and gloom.

Frank remembered his only other experience in the studio with James, when they'd been recording the Leathermouth record, which was its own kind of... Well, it had been. Interesting and painful to be a frontman. It unearthed something splintered in him, some fracture that had probably happened when Pencey broke up, which had scabbed over but left something dislocated underneath.

It had been the hardest thing to accept, and it still was, it was something he had to think about every day, the fact that this band was going to be the most important thing he ever did, and he wasn't the frontman. He watched Ray note down an ersatz series of slashes that probably translated to some drum notation he and Bob could both read, and thought, god damn, I'm not even the musical director.

"Frankie?"

"Right, right." Frank hunched over his guitar and tried a couple voicings for the chord James had played. He found one he liked and jammed on it for a few bars. "That's really nice, dude."

James winked at him. "I went to, like, two years of music school," he said magnanimously. "They teach you shit like that."

"Weren't you a percussionist?" Ray chimed in from across the room. "You guys don't know shit about chords."

Bob frowned and swatted Ray good-naturedly on the arm. James stuck his tongue out and played a giddy series of arpeggios up and down the keyboard, showing off.

By the end of the day they hadn't recorded anything, not really, but Gerard wasn't complaining about the idea of coming back in the next day, which was new for him this time around. Frank hit the button on his rental car keys and James got in the passenger's side.

They had a couple of days left, the two of them. James had stuff slated this summer, writing and recording with Matt in Kansas City, playing some shows. He had a life in New York. Frank wanted to bottle this day, keep it contained, sneak a sip of it when James was gone.

He couldn’t. He leaned over the car’s center console and slugged James amiably on the shoulder instead.

 

_Winter, 2008_

Frank’s hands were sweaty in too-big latex gloves. They were gonna smell weird when he took them off, he could already tell.

This whole tour had been the sort of upsetting that’s necessary, that bright pain of catharsis, every moon-bright feeling pouring off him when he performed. But it was almost… As though he couldn’t turn it all the way off, or contain it. Like a leaky tap, he could gush when he needed to but couldn’t twist back tightly enough to stop the _drip, drip, drip_ of his own raw nerves.

He swallowed, then set the needle of the tattoo gun against James’s skin.

“I can’t believe you’re doing this,” he said, drilling over the lines he’d drawn on in ballpoint.

James was deep into his phone, the sting of the needle barely registering. “If I told you I had qualms with shitty tattoos I’d be a hypocrite,” he said. He tugged on the sleeve of his sweater, twitching it over the kanji on his forearms.

“You ever think about getting those lasered off?” Frank asked, more to make conversation than anything.

“Hell no,” James said. He barked a laugh. “They’re ugly as sin but like… Would I even look like myself without ‘em?”

“Fair enough,” Frank said. He worked the needle over the curve of Boozey’s head, smoothing the line.

“What about you?” James asked. He put his phone into his sweater pocket and gave Frank his attention. “No regrets?”

“I don’t know,” Frank said jovially. “A couple years ago I got this tat for this band, Reggie and the Full Effect, and like… I guess they’re breaking up forever now, so that kinda sucks.”

James leaned up off the couch and Frank had to stop working while he shifted. Then James’s big, warm hand was on the top of his head, mussing his hair.

“That’s a stupid fuckin’ band name, Frankie,” he said, and leaned back down.

Frank smiled, and there was the incessant drip of his own feelings, out of him and down the drain.

 

_Summer, 2009_

_July, continued_

On the last night before James was scheduled to fly back out to New York, Frank came home from the studio to find him cluttering the kitchen with mixing bowls and pans. There was a steaming, round loaf of bread on a cutting board on the table, and what looked like another in the oven, and a third being formed under James’s hands.

The yeasty scent of baking bread permeated the kitchen, the living room, the entire prison cell of an apartment. Frank breathed it in, held it in his lungs like he would smoke. In the kitchen it was overwarm: James had the sleeves of his t-shirt rucked up, his hair pushed back from his face. He was kneading a boule of dough with the heels of his floured hands, turning it around and around on the counter.

“James,” Frank said.

James looked up and smiled. He jerked his head, like, _come here._ Frank couldn’t not.

“When you punch it down, you break up the gluten,” James said, coating Frank’s hands in flour and resting them on the bubble of the dough.

Frank tentatively pressed his knuckles in, and the dough gave under his hands. He reshaped it, kneaded it again, and again. After a few minutes James moved away, clattering around behind him and returning with a baking sheet spread liberally with coarse flour. Frank hefted up the lopsided boule of dough and James caught it with the pan and set it aside. They were very close.

From here Frank could see almost the entirety of his Los Angeles home. There was a pull-out couch where James had been sleeping, and the kitchen that had barely seen use before James arrived. Frank had been spending as much of his time as possible either at the studio or at Ray's house, or Mikey's house, or with Gerard and Lindsey and their baby, which was delightful and strange and overwhelming. Having James here changed everything. The kitchen smelled like a home. Frank tipped his face up to look at him.

"Frankie," James said quietly. It reeled him in. There was one tone that James sometimes adopted that Frank couldn't say no to, all soft and nervous and at once entirely unlike him and exactly like what he must be like, at the core of himself. James was seldom vulnerable.

"Yeah," Frank said, and shouldered into James's arms and held himself very still.

James drew his hand up and cupped the back of Frank's head in his palm, and it was so tender, Frank couldn't help but shiver. He burrowed closer into James's chest and tried to remember what it had been like, only a matter of months ago, to be on the road with him, and to feel the first spark of something divine, some partnership that felt fated.

He raised his face up inch by inch until he was nose-to-nose with James. His eyes were half-shut and anxious. Frank leaned up onto his toes and kissed him.

James's hand tightened in his hair for a moment, then slid down to cradle the back of Frank's neck, possessive, as he kissed him back. It was Frank's first instinct - with James, with anybody - to try to climb up into the other person's arms, to be owned, but they weren't so young anymore. James held him tightly around the waist anyway, as if he could sense just what Frank was feeling.

He gave in to the dizzying rush of the kiss.

The apartment was overwarm and they were still slotted in between the kitchen counter and the oven, clinging to each other, connected at the mouth. Frank had to fight to disentangle himself from James's big arms, and even then he kept getting caught up in it, in another drawn out kiss, in how it felt to put his damp lips to the side of James's face and just breathe. They made their laborious way to the bedroom.

Frank tumbled himself down onto the bed. He considered himself a progressive lover: if he wanted to be tossed down and manhandled he needn't wait for anyone else to do it for him. James knelt up on the bed and bent to kiss him again, and again, his mouth and his neck, the seven-legged scorpion below his ear. This was the part Frank liked best, exploring one another like this.

"Can I take off your shirt?" James asked. He was balancing on one forearm over Frank, and had his other hand full of Frank's hip. Frank nodded frantically and James pushed the t-shirt up over his head.

This wasn't anything James hadn't seen before. Probably there was no part of Frank that James hadn't encountered at some point in the last six years of knowing each other, but still. Frank loved the way people reacted to his ink. James put one big palm in the center of Frank's chest, over the bomb, and dragged it downward to watch the muscles in his chest and stomach shiver.

"I could get used to this," Frank panted, arching up against James's hand.

James pulled back a bit and gave him a calculating look. "Don't say something you don't mean," he said softly, and leaned down to kiss Frank again.

Before he had much chance to contemplate that, Frank was swept away in the moment, in the way the flat Californian sunshine slatted through the blinds and painted them in stripes of light and shadow, and how James's newly cut hair caught the sun and held it when he moved. James kissed his chest, and his soft stomach, and caught up his left hand so he could turn it over and push his mouth against the underside of his wrist, the tattoo there that matched his own.

Frank could feel the kiss jolt from his wrist down his whole arm, and he dragged James back down so he could take his left hand and do the same. Some awful, embarrassing, emotional confession was bubbling up in his throat and he swallowed it down, reminded himself that it wasn't the time or the place and that he was absolutely awful at knowing his own feelings anyway. He slipped an arm around James's back and pulled him up to kiss him on the mouth instead.

Getting James's shirt off was a thousand times harder now that they were alone than it was when they were on stage together - he was so preoccupied, kissing Frank, exploring the inked lines of his chest with his hands. When Frank finally managed to push James back long enough to tug his t-shirt over his head he was aching for some sort of skin contact. He pulled James down, chest to chest, and rolled them clumsily over so that he was straddling James's hips.

"You good?" he asked. James's chest and neck were flushed and he blinked up at Frank for a moment before nodding.

"Yeah, Frankie, I'm good."

They were both still in their jeans.

"Are we like..."

Frank wished James still got drunk, so if this turned out to be a mistake they could make it under the influence.

"Frankie, I came out here because you asked me to."

That made Frank pause. "Well, yeah," he said uncertainly. "But -"

"I wouldn't have come here for anybody else."

Frank met his eyes for a moment, then wriggled down so he could get at his fly.

"Frankie are we gonna talk about -"

"We can but I'd rather suck your dick," Frank said flatly. He tugged the button loose and shoved James's jeans down off his hips as far as he could before going after his boxers with zeal. He'd forgotten what this was like, this desperation to please somebody else just because they were good to you, and you cared about them, and you wanted to show it.

James was already hard under his hands, and Frank took a moment just to look, because maybe he wouldn't have this chance again, or maybe they'd both regret it and he wouldn't be able to remember it without that regret coloring the image, but he could at least let himself enjoy it wholly in the moment. James was soft and solid, propped up on his elbows so he could watch Frank watching him. His stomach creased where he bent, and Frank leaned up to kiss him there, and to press his cheek to his chest for a moment. He was warm, and his heart beat against the side of Frank's face in a reassuring kick drum rhythm.

Frank drew back, and steadied himself with a hand on the bed beside James's hip, and bowed his head to give him a long, thorough lick.

If he was honest with himself, Frank missed sucking dick. It's sort of like riding a bike, or Frank used to be better at it than he remembered, because James clutched at his hand almost bruisingly when Frank finally let his lips slide down to the base of his cock.

He cut his eyes up at James and did his best to maintain eye contact as he slid back up, then down again. There had been so many almosts, and he just wanted to see, to remember this one.

James's breath grew louder and more frantic and his hand on Frank's wrist tightened. This, this was what drove Frank crazy: being wanted, being needed, being the reason for the bruising pressure on his wrist. James came and Frank swallowed him down, and wiped his lips with the back of his free hand.

“God, please,” Frank murmured, drawing himself up to press against James, to push his face into his neck and breathe him in.

“What do you need?” James asked him. He was so warm, a column of heat all along Frank’s body.

“Your hand,” he mumbled into James’s neck. “Fuck, anything.” He was already rocking forward, trying to find friction in the hollow of James’s hip.

“Okay,” James murmured into his hair. He got his hand in between them and tugged at the button on Frank’s jeans until it pulled free, until he could undress him and take him in his palm. “Okay. Okay, Frankie.”

When James touched him, Frank couldn’t help the way his breath hitched, high and lonely, or the way his hips stuttered forward. And it was easy, easy like a dream to let James draw it out of him. It only took a couple of minutes before he was shaking apart in James’s arms.

They lay together like that for a long moment afterwards, Frank all but entirely on top of James, both of them shivering with the air conditioning and the cooling sweat on them. Frank finally peeled himself away from James and located a washcloth, got it wet, set about cleaning them up. James plucked his boxers up off the ground and wandered away to make sure there was nothing burning in the oven. When he returned, a few minutes later, Frank could hardly think of what to say to him.

“We should sleep,” he said lamely, moving over to make room in the bed for James.

It was strange to be doing this sober. It was strange to watch James settle in next to him and reach over him to turn out the lights, and to feel unsure of what happened next. He had come to rely on it - being sure with James - and that may not be in play anymore.

They lay side by side in the dark, in the quiet. Frank turned onto his side and watched the digital clock flick over from 10:36 to 10:37. Behind him, he heard James take a sharp, bracing breath, then felt the mattress shift as he rolled over and put his arm over Frank’s waist.

“Is this okay?” he said into Frank’s ear, his voice barely a whisper.

In the dark, Frank nodded. He pressed back into James’s arms. He thought about driving James to the airport in the morning, about how to say all the things he felt but didn’t know how to name, and the things he felt and could elucidate perfectly.

They slept.

*

Gerard had suggested they take a fifteen minute break over an hour ago. He was out on the studio loading dock - the designated brooding zone - with a lit cigarette dangling from the corner of his lips and his sketchbook settled in his lap. Frank had tapped out early to spend James’s last night in town doing anything but working, and the momentum seemed to have left with him. Last Gerard checked, Ray was giving Mikey a lesson on the various schools of thought around setting up a pedalboard, and Mikey was texting anyone who might distract him from learning.

But out here, with the harsh line of the highway in front of him and the great ribs of the Californian desert rising up around him, there was a certain scope for imagination. He uncapped a ballpoint pen and sketched a car. He rooted around in his pencil case for a heavy ink pen and went over it, exaggerating the car’s sharp corners. A muscle car.

He doodled Mikey with a big, cartoonish ray gun in his hand, then a horde of undetailed, quickly rendered zombies. He and Shaun had emailed more, at length, which had transitioned to phone calls, which led to near-daily text conversations. He pulled out his phone and snapped a picture of the page, sent it to Shaun. Received a response a moment later: _sure you don’t want to illustrate this one yourself?_

Even here, even alone, Gerard rolled his eyes. He had pencillers in mind. He had a whole ambitious list of artists of the caliber that - a few years ago - he never would’ve thought he’d be able to work with. He sent Shaun back a frowning emoticon.

Gerard lit another cigarette and watched the way the flat planes of Los Angeles carried the evening sun. He wished he’d brought markers, or watercolors, something that would capture the alien hues of the desert in the unspooled late afternoon. Instead, he sketched a few more people: Shaun’s androids, a woman in a mechanic’s coverall with a pair of pistols, a lone man at the edge of a peninsular cliff, with his back to the chasm beyond. Returning to the technical pen, Gerard began to refine the edges. The swift drop of the cliff; the man’s open, empty hands; the wry smile on his face. His willingness to fall.

The dying light had taken on its usual, ethereal umber by the time Gerard leaned back to inspect his work. He blinked.

It was Ray. The halo of windblown curls, the broad, laughing mouth. The patched jacket with a braided remnant of his Black Parade finery.

Gerard closed the sketchbook. That was the problem with the album, maybe. All of the moving parts were there, everything was fine on paper. But he’d set out an agenda and left no room for the heartbeat of his band. Of his friends. He didn’t want to be a part of any world that didn’t have the people he loved in it.

The door to the loading dock opened behind him and Ray stepped out.

“We were thinking of calling it a day,” he said. He offered a hand to Gerard and helped him up. “You get any good work done out here?”

Gerard bit the inside of his lip. “Nothing for the album, I don’t think.”

Ray slung an arm around his shoulders. “That’s okay,” he said. “As long as you’re making something you like, I’m happy.”

Gerard swallowed a swell of guilt. “I’m working on new lyrics - ” he started.

“I’m serious,” Ray interrupted him, kindly. He steered both of them back inside, then towards the studio’s front exit. “Work on what you want to work on. We got time, Gee.”

Ray lingered by Gerard’s car, watching him dig out his keys and get inside. He leaned down to peer in the window, both hands fisted in his pockets. “What’s good for you is good for the band.”

Gerard stuck his arm through the open driver’s side window and touched the side of Ray’s face. He thought of the drawing - how, without realizing it, he had rendered Ray as a hero in a world he was trying to invent from whole cloth. How there were no new stories, just retellings of the best ones. Now, with the sun setting behind him, Ray looked like he was peering into the cab of Gerard’s car from the rust-colored surface of Mars.

“Thank you,” Gerard said.

Ray smiled at him, and thumped the side of his fist on the roof of the car, and turned away to head home himself.

*

James had an early flight. Flying east was always a hassle, always took up your whole day, and he complained about it in the pre-dawn light as Frank drove him to the airport.

“Yeah, yeah, cry more,” Frank said fondly.

He took the lane that would put them at the parking garage, and James protested - “You can just drop me at the curb, dude!” - and found them an out-of-the-way spot. 

In the elevator down to the terminals Frank toyed with the impulse to take James’s hand, or to say something about last night, or even to press him up against the wall and kiss him again. Ultimately he did nothing, and hated himself for it, and found himself lingering near the security line with James waiting for the nerve to come to him.

“Thanks for coming out,” he said finally.

James shrugged good-naturedly. “I’m always down for a free trip,” he said.

Quiet hung between them like laundry on the line.

“Frankie,” James said, drawing it out. “You’ll be home soon. You’ll be okay.”

And suddenly he was that leaky faucet again, unable to keep a hold on himself. He blinked hard, fighting irrational tears.

“Yeah, you’re right,” he said, and pushed forward to put his arms around James’s middle. James’s hands fell heavily onto his back and he held him for a long moment before pressing a kiss into the side of his hair.

“I gotta go,” he said, and Frank squeezed him tighter.

“Please don’t,” he said, muffled by James’s chest. “I know I said I wouldn’t ask but can’t you just stay, and be in the band for real?”

James’s hand came up to stroke his hair. “Oh, Frankie,” he said. “You know I can’t do that. You don’t want me to do that. You think you do, but you don’t.”

“I do,” Frank said, one rogue tear spilling from him onto James’s t-shirt. “I do want you to, we all do.”

James shushed him, and petted him until he calmed down, and then they said a strange, perfunctory goodbye. Frank watched James until he couldn’t see him anymore, past the scanners and the TSA people and the shops selling overpriced snacks and newspapers.

He drove himself back to his apartment and dove back into the sheets that still smelled like James, and pulled them up over his head, and slept.

*

Gerard had let his roots grow in, leaving him mousy and brunet and less striking, but with publicity on the horizon he had taken to asking everyone what look he should adopt next.

Frank always knew he'd be important in music, in the way he dreamed about as a kid. He didn't have any designs on being the best guitar player or the best singer, but he knew he'd find the right people, he'd tell the right story, he'd do something huge. And as much as it maybe pained him to admit it, he had always assumed when he got famous it would be off songs he'd written, connections he'd made, his lyrics instead of his friends and his pretty face. He thought maybe he'd have a partner, somebody who understood his vision and complemented it and brought him to the fore.

Gerard's bathroom door was open, and Frank could see in from where he was sitting in the den, where Gerard was wearing a ratty old shirt and sitting on the closed toilet lid, and Ray was looming over him, big hands delicately holding a tint brush and painting black dye into Gerard's hair. They were making each other laugh.

That's what Frank had imagined for himself, if he was going to be really honest. Somebody who was to him like Ray was to Gerard. And maybe they were a little codependent, and maybe they shut other people out of their club from time to time, but they knew exactly what they were doing and they were both so fucking good at it.

Gerard tipped his face up so that Ray could dig into his roots and coat them with dye, and he shut his eyes and smiled, completely content. Ray was so patient with him like this. Gerard was so easy for him to take care of, instinctually, and in return he lent his extraordinary voice to Ray's musical visions and they... Well, they were a Page and Plant, a Jagger and Richards, a Mercury and May. And Frank was a... Well. There was no good cliche for a guy who mattered just as much but was outside of the kismet.

Frank wondered if he'd ever stop feeling like the new guy. At least he and Bob had that in common.

Ray smoothed Gerard's hair back from his face and then deliberately smudged a line of dye across his forehead with one gloved thumb, and Gerard laughed and swatted his hands away, and they came out to wait for the dye to set.

"You look good, Gee," Frank said.

He didn't. He was all gummed up with dye and smudgy and frumpy in his oversized paint shirt, but he looked happy, and that's what Frank meant.

"Well thanks, Frankie," Gerard said sincerely. "Gotta stay pretty so I can keep us in the black. We can't rely totally on you for the looks."

Frank rolled his eyes. He’d seen a little bit of the backlash when he’d been touring Leathermouth, the kids on twitter who hated his beard, who thought he’d gotten fat, who hated the music he was making and found him ugly as a result of that. He minded less than he’d thought he would. “Gerard, my days as an androgynous sex symbol are behind me. It’s Mikey’s turn to pick up the slack.”

Gerard laughed. It felt good - normal - to make Gerard laugh. Across the room Ray was taking a phone call, leaning up against Gerard’s bookcase. What a startling relief it was for them all to just _hang out_ with each other.

Frank was butchering a very involved joke Jamia had told him the other night on the phone when Ray sat down on the couch beside him looking deflated. Frank stopped trying to resuscitate the joke and turned to look at him.

“What’s up, dude?” he said.

“I’m, uh, I have to go back to Jersey for a little bit,” he said slowly. “I’m sorry, I…” He paused. “My grandmother just died.”

*

Frank was in the studio for lack of anything else to occupy him, and because Bob and Mikey were there, and they were good company most of the time. Gerard was there, too, technically - he was chain smoking outside and writing in a big, hard-backed sketchbook with one of his pretentious-ass fountain pens.

“Play me a groove, Mikey Way,” Bob said, leaning back behind the kit. He adjusted the hi-hat clutch and settled into a slow, jazzy backbeat.

Mikey stared at him, nonplussed. He set down his phone. “You asked for this,” he said, and began a plodding bass line that paid very little attention to tonal harmony or melodic rules of thumb. It made Frank laugh, which made Bob laugh without faltering his beat, which made one of those tight-lipped smiles twist up on Mikey’s face. He bent his head to watch his picking hand.

Frank was laying on the dingy studio carpet, his unplugged guitar a couple of feet away. It took him several pathetic attempts to grab it and - too lazy to get up and plug it in - add an unpleasant texture of toneless, metallic chords underneath Mikey’s bass line.

“This is the sound of the future,” he said. “My Chemical Romance sounds like this now.”

Mikey laughed in earnest and it was such an unexpected sound that Bob’s hands stuttered and he lost the beat. They all collapsed into laughter.

Just then, Gerard appeared in the doorway, his omnipresent sketchbook dangling from one hand. “I have some lyrics - did you guys have any luck with the music?” He was looking directly at Frank, where he was still sprawled on the floor, not even plugged in.

“Uh… Not so much,” Frank said.

Gerard sighed. “Okay.” He stepped over the threshold and settled down on the floor next to Frank before flipping to the back of his sketchbook. “Okay. Let’s see what we can do with this.”

*

Gerard scrolled through his recent calls, all of which were outgoing, all of which were to Ray. How juvenile to be calling his best friend over and over, looking for reassurance; he was a grown-ass thirty-two year-old man with a daughter, after all.

Despite his best intentions, he tapped redial with his thumb.

“Geeway,” Ray said when he answered. He sounded tired. He was three hours later, back in Jersey to help his mom clear out his grandmother’s house after she’d passed away. Gerard could picture him, exhausted in his childhood bed, a heavy moon suspended outside the open window and a breeze blowing in.

“Ray,” he said, pathetic.

There were the sounds of Ray turning over, adjusting his phone, pushing back the snarl of his slept-on hair. “Talk to me,” he said.

And that was it. Gerard was undone, and it was spilling out of him. He’d gone over the beginnings of the mix with Brendan O’Brien that morning and had picked three songs, ones he felt he could believe in, to start with. By the afternoon he hated them, had a different two that he thought could work. No matter how he cut apart the work they’d put in he couldn’t come up with ten, much less twelve songs that might make an album.

On the other end of the phone, in his parents’ house in New Jersey, Ray listened.

“What ones do you feel like you want to use now?” he asked, after a pause.

Gerard was as sure of the songs as he was sure he’d feel differently tomorrow. “‘Burn Bright’ and ‘The World is Ugly,’” he said.

“Why those ones?”

Another simple answer. “They’re about you.”

Ray was quiet for a long time, in the way he had when he wanted to give a lot of thought, a lot of weight to what he was going to say next.

“That’s not the way to make an album, G,” he said gently.

Gerard could remember with perfect clarity the way Ray had cornered him backstage at Madison Square Garden, pressed him back into one of the shower cabinets and peered down into his face and told him, point blank, that he should start another band. And the way it’d made sense, the way the two of them had built something so majesterial together, something they could never come back from.

Gerard had leaned up and pressed his forehead to Ray’s and hadn’t said anything, not yet, and had thought about it a lot through the Eisner’s and the odd, bewilderingly calm wake of the tour. And then there had been things to take care of, offers, the Watchmen soundtrack and the label murmurings of a follow-up, and Ray had moved out to LA because he’d asked him to.

And they’d played together and of course it still felt right, it would never not feel right to play with Ray.

“You quitting on me, Toro?” he asked.

He could hear Ray slowly shaking his head on the other end of the line. “I just… There’s more than one way to take the easy way out, Gerard,” he said. “And you could quit now, or you could make the album you think everyone wants you to make, but…” He sighed. “I want you to do what you want to do. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

Across three thousand miles the dome of the sky faded from the gouache splatters of a tangerine sunset over Gerard’s house to an inky, bottomless indigo above Ray’s. Gerard opened the back door and stepped out onto the porch and let the slanting light saturate him, let himself poach in the burnt sienna and amber sun.

“Ray,” he said again.

“Yeah,” Ray said. He sounded half asleep now, his broad mouth barely moving to articulate the word.

“Come home,” Gerard said. “I mean, I’m, do what you have to do, we’re fine, but. Please come home.” A beat. “I can’t do this without you.”

 

_August_

Of course everything would go to shit the second they seemed to be getting somewhere.

With Ray back from Jersey, productivity was higher, morale was better, and Gerard was less terminally bitchy. They’d spent all morning trying out raucous guitar parts, with Gerard yelling over the top, making stuff up in the moment. Frank was testing out a new overdrive pedal that sounded crunchy and excellent against the setup Ray was using. The chords were there, the structure of the song seemed to fall into place more easily than anything else they’d done so far.

When they broke for lunch and a much-needed coffee break, Frank found himself unintentionally optimistic. Maybe they hadn’t been doing it wrong, maybe they’d been doing what they always had to do to make anything of value: make each other miserable for a while.

He dug the carton of almond milk out of the back of the studio fridge and poured some into his coffee. He tipped his head down to face the cup, the billowing clouds of milk that were only just beginning to settle. Frank allowed himself a smile.

When he got back to the studio he found Ray clearing out the last of the takeout containers from lunch, humming to himself. He looked up when Frank walked in and grinned, showing all his big teeth. Frank could feel the tension he’d been carrying since they started working on the album begin, cautiously, to unthread itself from his body.

“It’s not just me, right?” he asked Ray. “We sound _good_ today, don’t we.”

“Yeah,” Ray said. “We sound good. Also, like, remember how we used to have fun playing music together?”

Frank laughed. “Nah, that’s just a rumor. Music isn’t supposed to be _fun,_ Ray.”

Ray’s laugh was high and soft but it filled the room, and Frank smiled. He picked up his guitar from the stand and nodded to Ray. “Want to nail down that middle eight while we’ve got a minute?”

It was closer to twenty minutes before the rest of the band filtered back in, refreshed from their cigarettes and phone calls and trips to the Starbucks down the road for slightly more glamorous coffees than the one currently growing lukewarm on Frank’s amp head. Bob headed straight for his kit, picking the beat up under Ray and Frank’s experimentations.

“I got some words,” Gerard announced when he wandered in a minute later. “Let’s run through it and lay this sucker out.”

All in all they practiced it three times before setting up all the mics and trying a live take. They wanted to ride on the momentum of the entire day. It was a rough demo but it was something they could take home to work on. They all stood behind the mixing desk while Brendan played it back to them.

“I think this is really something, guys,” he said excitedly. “I’m all for writing outside your comfort zone, but it’s good to see you haven’t abandoned the story-driven stuff completely.”

Gerard shifted his weight from left to right. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, just - “ Brendan started. He looked unsure. “The rest of the record is so, y’know… This one has characters in it. Right?” He scrubbed through the recording on ProTools and played them a bit. “Like, who’s Jenny? I mean, this sounds like My Chem to me.” He tried a cautious smile, even though Gerard was frowning. Brave of him, Frank thought.

“I don’t know,” Ray said quickly, putting a hand on Gerard’s shoulder. “It’s not that different from the other stuff we’ve been writing, I mean, musically speaking.”

Gerard shrugged Ray’s hand off. “So it’s my fault?”

“That’s not what I’m saying!” Ray said. “Look, I _love_ these lyrics. I think we wrote a really great song today and it’s gonna sound great on our record. Can’t that be enough?”

Gerard crossed his arms. “Brendan can you give us all a minute?” he said flatly.

Frank watched Brendan scramble out of the room and wished he could do the same.

“Look, I was gonna wait until we were done for the day to talk about this,” Gerard started, unfolding his arms and gesturing broadly to the rest of them. “I wanted to, like - it seemed like we were doing really good, so I thought we could have this conversation on a high note?”

The rest of them stood, silent. Even Ray was quiet, studying Gerard’s face from a couple of feet away, his face impassive.

Finally, Frank broke the silence. “Okay, what’s up, G?”

“I just - “ Gerard paused. “I know I’ve been a pain in the ass but I wanted to, like, ask you guys straight up. Do you think we can delay the album until next year?”

For a long moment, nobody spoke. “You’re kidding, right?” Bob said.

Gerard shook his head.

“Gerard, we’re just starting to _get_ somewhere!” Frank said. “I don’t - I mean, the songs could use some work but I know there’s stuff in there we can use.”

Gerard gave an enormous, theatrical shrug.

“We can gut those songs next year, when we’re not so close to them,” he said. “I feel like if I touch any of that stuff again right now I’m gonna, I don’t know, go into anaphylactic shock, I can’t work on them anymore.”

“What about the stuff we wrote today?” Ray asked quietly. “What if we scrap everything and focus on new stuff for now?”

Gerard spun to face him. His voice was high and hysterical. “The stuff we wrote today? I stole all those words out of a comic book I’m supposed to be writing. I don’t - Ray, I don’t _have_ anything else in me! I’m trying to revise that script and work on this project and I just, I’m out of ideas. I don’t have any more big concepts for you, okay?”

“Gerard,” Mikey said, quietly, and it silenced the room. “Calm down.”

Gerard was breathing hard, almost winded from his own words. “I don’t want to be one of those singers who misses his entire kid’s life because he doesn’t know when to say no to the band,” he said. “I’m asking for a little time. I’m asking you as a friend.”

Ray was beginning the slow motions of gathering Gerard up and guiding him out of the studio for a cigarette and a long talk when Bob spoke.

“Do you even realize how selfish you’re being?”

Gerard turned to him. “Excuse me?”

“I just.” Two circles of red burned high on Bob’s pale cheeks. “I just think you’re being really selfish right now.”

“Bob - “ Frank said, hoping to head another argument off at the pass.

“No, I’m done not saying anything. All I ever do in this band is stay silent and work and I can’t, I’m not gonna fucking do that anymore. I’m tired of pretending it’s easy to cater to Gerard Way’s high art internal pain all the time.”

“Seriously - “ Ray said warningly, but Bob cut him off.

“I’m being serious!” he said, almost laughing with the effort it was taking not to curl his hands into fists. “You drag us out to LA and give us this laundry list of rules for writing, you bring us all these half-assed lyrics because you don’t know how to budget your time, you spend ages telling us that we’re all doing the band wrong without acknowledging it’s your goddamn rules that put us in this situation. I’m done, Gerard! I’m not taking any more of this, now or next year!”

“Bob,” Gerard said, reaching for Bob’s arm as he shouldered his way past them to the studio door.

“No, man, you don’t get to talk me out of this one,” he said. He didn’t even sound angry anymore. He just sounded, Frank thought, very tired. “You know what? You finally buck all those rules long enough to bring us a good song, and you’re too busy having some kind of personal crisis about, like, _what kind of artist you want to be,_ to even acknowledge that _this_ is what your band is supposed to sound like.” He swallowed hard. “Get over yourself, Gerard.”

The rest of them stood in stunned silence as they listened to Bob stomp up the hallway and out the studio’s front door.

“Gee,” Mikey said softly. “I’m sorry.”

“Guys,” Frank said. He was still staring at the open door. “You mind if we call it a day?”

Gerard laughed, a morose, bitter sound. “Yeah, might not be the worst idea.”

They trooped together out to the parking lot and split off to their separate cars. Frank didn’t even think to text Brendan until he was a mile away at a long stoplight.

In the grand tradition of being Frank Iero and being in this band, he took the highway exit that led not to his own apartment, but the one that would take him to Patrick Stump’s soulless Los Angeles home. He drove slowly through the neighborhood, trying to think of the right phrasing, the words that would smooth everything over.

When he pulled into the driveway there was no sign of Bob’s car. Maybe he’d gone for a drive to clear his head, maybe he would be pulling up any moment, ready to hear Frank out, for them both to apologize. Frank waited in his car for a few minutes, then got out and located the spare key under a stone in the backyard.

All of Bob’s things were gone. The house was entirely empty, not as though someone had ransacked it, or packed their things in a hurry, but as though no one had lived there at all.

*

Bob had flown back to Chicago.

They all found out via Craig, who had found out via text message, and now they were sitting around the studio wondering what the fuck they were supposed to do.

Gerard was staring at Frank. "Are you going to go get him?" he said finally.

That was the question. If they sent Frank it would be to convince him back, to lead him back to California by one of his frail wrists. If they sent Ray it would be to do Ray's unofficial second job, which of course was to fire drummers.

"Can we think about it?" Frank asked.

Gerard nodded. He looked, Frank realized, fucking exhausted. So did Ray, although he showed it less, was better at keeping upbeat. Mikey looked between them and then to Frank.

"I don't want this to get fucked up," he said. His face, his voice, they were as carefully expressionless as ever, but they had all known him for so long. Frank could feel the anxiety radiating off Mikey, the way it seemed like maybe this thing, this band that had nearly broken all of them and had come the closest with Mikey, was becoming something insurmountable.

"Don't worry, man, we're gonna figure it out," he said lamely.

The only useless urge rattling through Frank about the whole thing was to call James and talk it over, which wouldn't do any good, because James was terrible at confrontation and hated to have opinions on things that didn't specifically concern him. Frank thumbed through his contacts and hovered over his number without calling seven times that evening.

When he had crawled into bed - bed which, he realized with chagrin, still smelled faintly of James - he pulled his phone out and scrolled through to James's number, and against his better judgment, hit send.

It was only when James picked up, disoriented and sleepy sounding, that Frank recalled the time difference. It was nearly midnight in Los Angeles, but it was three in the morning on Long Island, and even James's erratic sleeping schedule usually covered the wee hours of the morning.

"Shit, sorry, go back to bed," Frank said.

"No, no, I'm up." He could hear James getting out of bed, whispering something to Danika, stepping out into the living room. "What do you need, Frankie?"

Frank didn't want to read into the phrasing but it made him want to cry all of a sudden. What do you need. What did he need? James to be here, to tell him what to do.

"I think the band's breaking up," he said, and he knew it sounded melodramatic and he didn't care. He swallowed back the tearful feeling rising in his throat. "Bob went back to Chicago and we're either going to fire him or I have to convince him to stay, and Gerard hates everything we've written, and I can't figure out how to keep up with Ray the way I used to, and Mikey's the only one who's doing good right now but he hates that we can't just get it done and I want to, I want to just put something out there so he doesn't have to feel like shit about it and mostly I just want to come home because I miss Jamia and I miss you and -"

"Fuck," James said. "Slow down."

Frank hiccuped and stayed quiet and waited for James to process his word-vomit.

"Okay," he said finally. "The band's not breaking up yet. If you weren't fighting I'd be worried because it'd mean you didn't care enough, but you are, so it's gonna be okay." Frank could almost see James ticking things off on his fingers. "You might need to fire Bob. You'll deal with that when it comes up. The rest of it, that's just practice, that's just being in a band. You figure it out."

For a long moment there was nothing but the hum of the phone and the miles between them. Frank focused on keeping his breathing steady and slow.

"Frankie, do you need me to come back out?"

Everything in Frank wanted to scream yes, wanted to demand that James come back and fix the band and finally accept their invitation to join for real, that maybe if James was around things would be better and Bob would come back on his own and they could all be happy again. Frank wanted James to come back and use the keys he had to this apartment, wanted him to come in and lay down beside Frank and talk to him about what had happened, about whether or not there was something between them they needed to talk about.

Frank wanted to be taken care of, and he didn't know how to say that without sounding pathetic, so he didn't.

"I miss you," he said again, and even that sounded too forward. "I miss playing with you."

James breathed out slowly on the other end of the phone. "You'll tour again," he said. "You know where I am."

"That's not what I mean."

Frank pulled the duvet up over his head so that it was just him and the light from the phone pressed to his cheek, cocooned under the covers, just him and James's voice from three thousand miles away.

"I know, Frankie," James said. "I don't know what to tell you."

Frank stayed under the covers listening to James breathe on the other side of the country until he fell asleep, and when he woke up his phone was dead in his hand and his alarm clock was shrieking.

*

The evening was clear and cool, hurtling towards dusk, and Gerard was miserable. He felt unused and scratchy, a pen nib gobbed with dried ink, ideas unsketched, unwritten. He was so settled, so complete in his happiness otherwise, unimaginably complete, that this sticking point in the album rubbed him raw.

He sat on the back porch of his beautiful house and didn’t stir when he heard the door slide open behind him, because it could only be one of two people: his wife, whose thorough and immediate understanding of him had been an electrifying relief, and who would be happy to sit with him and stargaze and keep him company in his melancholy, or Ray.

“You didn’t answer my text,” Ray said, a long moment after he settled down beside Gerard. He wasn’t looking at him, but he didn’t seem upset; his dark eyes were soft in the dwindling sunset, looking out towards the treeline.

“I left my phone inside,” Gerard said. “I’ve been out here a while.”

“I figured.”

When Gerard looked at Ray, really looked at him, he felt undone. He could see across timelines, universes. He could see the ghost of Ray in high school, Ray in his tiny bedroom back in Jersey with his close-cropped hair and wire-framed glasses, Ray in the blinding sun on their very first Warped Tour stage. If he concentrated he pretended he could see further: Ray in a few years time, growing a beard the way he always talked about when they were on tour and he was tired of shaving; Ray becoming a father, perpetually worn out but immeasurably happy; Ray in twenty years with the smile lines around his eyes and nose worn in permanently, still sitting on Gerard’s porch and turning to look at him, like he was doing now.

In the long threads of the orange sunset, Ray put his hand on Gerard’s shoulder and pulled him in against his side. “C’mon,” he said softly into Gerard’s hair. “Let’s go.”

The fact that Ray drove the car he did - an entirely impractical vintage Corvette - was something you could only understand about him if you’d known him for a very long time. It was immaculately maintained. It belonged both to the god Ray became with a guitar in his hands and to the man he was at home, meticulous, a lover of projects. Gerard eased himself into the passenger seat. The leather was warm from the lingering sun.

They drove in the opposite direction of the city, its glitter and shine reflected in the rearview mirrors. The car hummed underneath them. Ray usually put the radio on when he was driving because he liked to sing along, his high, sweet voice close in the tiny cab of the Corvette, but he left it off this time, and neither of them spoke very much. They skirted around Los Angeles’s northern perimeter and merged onto the Pacific Coast Highway, so that they were bracketed in by the palisades on one side and the vast expanse of the pacific ocean on the other.

From where Gerard was sitting, if he looked over towards the driver’s side, Ray was silhouetted by a backdrop of the bleeding sunset and its bruised reflection in the ocean below it. From here, it was hard to discern the precise line of the horizon. From here, Gerard could almost will the curve of the planet into visibility, a gentle parabola upon which the Corvette coasted.

They drove until true dusk began to seep into the sky from the east, and Ray pulled off the highway into Topanga Canyon and parked at a wide shoulder of the road that looked out over the ocean. They got out and Ray swung his legs over the barrier so he could sit on the edge of it. Gerard, always less graceful, did the same.

Ray was wearing a black silk bomber jacket embroidered with great splashes of cherry blossoms. The silk was the kind that seemed to invite a touch, smooth and mercurial, and Ray was the sort of person who invited a touch as well, if you were Gerard. He leaned into Ray’s shoulder and linked their arms loosely together. The forest at their backs and all around them was becoming shaded in steadily more opaque tones of purple and myrtle green, though the sky over the ocean was still light enough to feel vast and open and very blue. Ray shifted so that his cheek pressed against the top of Gerard’s head.

“Do you know why I brought you here?” he asked.

Gerard searched himself for the right answer. He knew it, but he couldn’t find words to describe the reason itself. He could say specifically every reason Ray had _not_ brought him here, could find the perimeter of the right thing to say by describing the negative space, and yet. In lieu of the right answer he tried the one he thought would make Ray laugh.

“To make out?”

Ray did laugh. “Maybe later.”

They sat propped against each other for a long while, watching the violet twilight bleed through the sky, spidering towards the horizon. Above them, stars were coming out.

Abruptly, Gerard remembered the first time he’d kissed Ray. It was a little embarrassing to think about. It was a little embarrassing for Gerard to be the same person as certain younger iterations of himself. They had been stoned. They had been working out the chord changes to Demolition Lovers in Gerard’s basement bedroom, and Gerard had leaned over Ray’s shoulder to watch his hand on the fingerboard of the shitty acoustic guitar that belonged either to Gerard or to Mikey, he couldn’t remember. Ray had turned his head and they had been confronted with one another, and Gerard had said, “Ray if I kiss you right now can we not talk about it afterwards” all in one breath, and instead of answering Ray had tipped forward just enough to encourage Gerard to do the same.

And they hadn’t talked about it, and had kissed again a few weeks later and hadn’t talked about it, and somewhere along the way, the crooked path from then to now had been cleared of brambles and they were… Exactly what they were. Ray and Gerard.

“Gee, do you want to stop doing the band?” Ray asked. He was careful not to weight his inflection one way or the other. He just wanted to know.

Gerard shifted just enough to unbury his face from Ray’s neck. The sky was deep and broad out in front of them. The forest fell away below them, and sky was all Gerard could see. He tightened his hand on Ray’s arm to keep himself from falling up into that inky darkness, to resist the pull of that brocade of distant stardust. He knew the answer to this question, too - the name of it, if not the shape of it.

“No,” he said, finally. “But we can’t do it like this.”

Ray nodded. Gerard could feel it against the crown of his head. “How do you want to do it?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Ray disentangled his arm from Gerard’s so he could put it around his shoulders instead. Gerard leaned into the warmth of him, how secure he made him feel.

“Do you know why I brought you out here?” Ray asked again.

Gerard felt the weight of the answer he couldn’t quite carry. “To have this conversation,” he said.

Ray shook him gently, admonishing. “Because there’s a whole world, Gerard.” He was beginning to know the shape of the answer. “There’s a whole world, and it’s yours and mine, it’s all of ours. And you don’t have to live in it any way you don’t want to.”

Even the trees all around them, even Topanga Canyon hollowed out below them, even the vastness of sky and space and the whirling galaxy hummed. Gerard tilted his face up so that his mouth could find Ray’s jaw and drop a kiss there, and then accept one in return. He held onto the pocket of Ray’s silk jacket. Of this, at least, he felt entirely sure.

*

Frank shouldered his bag. There was a flight departing for O'Hare in an hour and a half. He could call Bob from the terminal, or he could get a bus. Ring the bell at his apartment. Wait on the stoop until he came downstairs, solid and blue-eyed and absolutely incapable of saying he was sorry.

They could have it out right there in the sweltering humidity blowing in off the lake, or he could follow Bob upstairs and they could sit on opposite sides of Bob's couch and actually talk to each other, for once. Frank could get on his knees and beg for things they both knew they couldn't change: Gerard's obstinance, or Ray's perfectionism, or the fact that they'd made a record and were in the metaphorical process of cramming it down the garbage disposal, burying themselves in debt.

Frank could lean up over him on the couch and bend at the neck to kiss him.

Frank recalled, very vividly, the first time he had done so. Bob wasn't even in the band, yet - he was touring Europe with them, getting paid nothing, dropping off good tours to slum it with a bunch of promising nobodies from New Jersey and their put-upon manager. Ray was in the driver's seat, swearing, smoking a rare cigarette with his right hand dangling out the window of the funny European cargo van. Brian sat beside him folded up behind three square yards of incomprehensible maps. In the middle bench seat Mikey was crammed in between Gerard and Otter, complaining about the smell.

And in the third row, in an improbable fort built out of boxes of t-shirts and bags of laundry and detritus that always seemed to accumulate on tours like this one, Frank had leaned up over a stack of time-softened cardboard boxes and kissed Bob very softly, once, on the mouth. They had stumbled over one another and found it necessary to hang on, for years.

Now, waiting in line to buy his ticket, Frank thought about the ways they'd changed. Gerard wearing his responsible, new grownup face, going to photo shoots for menswear magazines as though he hadn't been an unwashed basement-dweller naught five years before. Ray, married and happy, living in LA, swearing almost as much as he used to but keeping more of a handle on it in polite company. Mikey, who had changed perhaps the most of all of them, and the least. His glasses had disappeared and he'd shed the long coats he wore onstage but that reserved tightening of his lips over his funny teeth was the same, and the deliberate, careful way he was with all of them was the same. Otter, gone. Brian, much more painfully, gone.

Bob. Gone?

Frank remembered sitting in the lobby of the cheapest hotel they could find in London that tour and typing out a three or four sentence email to James, asking him whether or not he knew if the Get Up Kids were splitting up yet, and how it was touring with New Found Glory, and if he was doing all right with the.... And Frank had deleted the last sentence and signed off with "miss you" and wondered if he should tell James, or anybody, about kissing Bob in the back of the van and wanting very badly to do it again.

"When's the next flight to LaGuardia?" he asked the clerk at the ticket counter.

"There's one in forty-five minutes," she said, clicking through a few windows in her computer. "And another in three hours, which you could make a little easier."

Frank sighed. "I'm actually headed to Chicago," he said. He dug his credit card up out of the depths of his jeans pocket.

He got through security with minimal fuss and made it to his gate without much time to spare.

He landed.

Frank looked out over the goyan brown skyline of New York City in the summertime, and walked down to the street level to find a town car.

 

_Winter, 2008_

The van pelted down a snowy highway somewhere in southern Connecticut. They’d just crossed through Westchester, all those trees and rambling houses crusted in a veil of frost. Hambone was at the wheel and the rest of them were crammed into the spaces not occupied by gear, by big cardboard boxes of hoodies and t-shirts and CDs. James had driven all the way down to New Jersey to ride up with them, and he was half-asleep leaning against the window next to Frank, his hair falling into his face.

In maybe the most anachronistic thing he’d done yet, Hambone was playing an old Joni Mitchell cassette in the tape deck. It made Frank think of his mother, and of being younger, and of the future of his real band stretched out before him in shades of uncertainty.

Instead of wrestling with those thoughts, he listened to the piano, and leaned around a precariously balanced amp head to rest his head on James’s shoulder.

“Thanks for joining my band,” he said.

It was a cadence for them: they had no more tour dates planned, probably ever. Frank’s email was overflowing with My Chem plans already - flights to book and rental apartments in Los Angeles to look at, things in Jersey to square away before heading out to write the next album. And it was exciting, but it was impossible not to feel shackled by it, to feel the weight of expectation on everything going forward.

Beside him, James made a soft, affirming sound. “You’re welcome.”

Even in the early afternoon the sky outside was dark, the steely clouds foretelling more snow. The way the dim light reflected in the drifts by the side of the road made the whole of the Taconic parkway look alien and soft, a dreamscape. An eerie otherworld imbued with possibility.

Frank swallowed.

“I know we’ve talked around it a little bit, but…” he started. He could feel the unsettling beat of his heart in his own wrists, in his neck. “Have you given any more thought to joining My Chem full time?”

It was an offer they’d made to him nearly the same moment they decided to keep going after the Black Parade. It had been an entirely unanimous decision. And when James had asked for time to think it over, none of them had really expected him to say no. But he had obligations with Vagrant Records regarding his last album, which was being released after two years of uncertainty, and he asked for more time, and they all needed a break from big decision-making anyway. But now, with the new album looming on the horizon and no answer reached, Frank was getting anxious.

James pressed his cheek to the cold windowpane. Every time he exhaled a little ellipse of steam formed on the window.

“Do you know why I joined Leathermouth?” he asked.

Frank was quiet. To be honest, he’d never really thought about it.

“When I joined up with Coalesce, I was the conservatory yuppie who ruined their sound,” he said tonelessly. “When the Get Ups brought me on I was the one who got blamed for them getting too big to be fun anymore.” He twisted to look at Frank. “It’s really, really nice of you guys to ask me, and if you want me on tour I’m happy to come,” he said. “But I can’t keep joining bands, Frankie.”

“James, you’re already basically in the band,” Frank protested. “We want you to write with us. We want you to, y’know, own My Chem with us. It doesn’t have to be like that.”

James smiled. He shifted around until he had an arm free of the van’s detritus and used it to ruffle Frank’s hair. “It always is, Frankie. And it’s okay to give your fans what they want once in awhile.”

“They want you in the band,” Frank said petulantly. “They just don’t _know_ it yet.”

James barked a laugh. “I’m not joining up, dude. It’s not in the cards for me right now.” He was quiet for a long moment. “You ever want to start something else new, you go ahead and call me.”

The stereo thunked as the Joni Mitchell tape turned over and started back at the beginning. The van sped down the highway in the weak afternoon light. Above it, the laden clouds let down their burden of snow.

 

_Summer, 2009_

_August, continued_

James's house was situated far out on Long Island, almost to Babylon. It was set back from the road, with cones of drying wisteria dripping from its eaves and gutters, impossible to fight back even with the sharpest clippers.

Frank sat on the stoop for nearly ten minutes before the door opened quickly behind him and hit him in the back. On the other side of it, Danika yelped, then rolled her eyes and invited him inside.

"He's not here," she said, digging for her keys in her purse. "But he shouldn't be too long. You should wait inside, it's hot out today."

She had a sleeve of delicately threaded tattoos. She had a lovely, angular face and the set of her jaw told Frank she could probably kill him without trying, but they got on well. He was immeasurably glad of her patience for him.

"Thanks," he said.

She rolled her eyes again. "Y'know," she said. "It doesn't always have to be so melodramatic."

And she left, locking the front door behind her. A minute later Frank could hear her car start in the driveway, then reverse out and drive away.

He sat at the kitchen table, alone in James's house. From here he could see the upright piano that James had lugged all the way from his parents' house in Liberty, Missouri, and the little rack of guitars set off to the side of it. Drum cases stacked in something almost resembling an order beside the guitars. There was nothing James couldn't play.

He sat for a long time like that, looking over James's home and the life he had built for himself out on the easternmost stretch of New York. As far as he could get from Kansas. Some time later, he heard the sound of the key in the lock, and then:

"Frankie."

Frank turned to see James standing in the doorway, and spread his hands helplessly. "I'm supposed to be in Chicago," he said.

James shut the door behind himself and moved in closer. He was almost... Skittish couldn't be the word, James was too clumsy and unsubtle to be skittish, and yet. He paused a few feet away, leaning one big hand on the countertop.

"What for?" he asked cautiously.

Frank paused. "Something..." he started, and then stopped. He didn't have the words for it. "Something that I couldn't have done, anyway."

James looked at him very intently for a moment. "Frankie, what are you doing here?"

And that was the question, wasn't it. Here in James's small, homey kitchen with its clay jar of sourdough starter on the counter by the window, the dogs loafing around under the table, the six pack of beer in the fridge that neither Danika nor James could remember buying so neither of them would do anything with it, in case somebody had left it there by mistake.

"You know when you... When we were in my apartment, and we were making bread?" Frank asked.

Of course he knew. Memories of that night rushed back to Frank in vivid, technicolor detail just by invoking it. James couldn't have forgotten.

"I just..." Frank continued. "Love isn't a stone. You don't trip over it, or find it someplace and pick it up and put it in your pocket. You can't... You can't keep it. You have to make it, over and over again."

The lamp above them added an almost imperceptible hum to the room.

"I don't know what you're trying to say," James said. They looked at each other. James cleared his throat. "Or, maybe I do, but... I'm not so good with cryptic bullshit, you know that."

Instead of trying again, of trying to explain the way the dough felt under his hands, and how his hands felt under James's, and the way they had fit together and _created,_ Frank stood. He closed the gap between them. The overhead lamp quieted somewhere in the forgotten space behind him.

"Can I..." he said, leaning up slowly to kiss James, to give him time to pull away.

It was less of a kiss than the press of his pliant lips to James's mouth, a breaking of the bubble between them. James put his hand on the dip under Frank's ribcage and looked down at him with his dark, shrewd eyes.

"I'm not going to be your rebound, just because you don't know how to go proposition Bryar, or fire him. Just because you can't figure out what you'd rather do," he said. He sounded tired.

Frank wilted. He had been so sure, had known that with the way he and James seemed to understand one another, James would understand this.

And then, swimming to the turbid surface of his mind, everything he knew - really knew - about James. His insecurities. The way, after they'd had sex, he had wrapped all his limbs around Frank, every burning inch of him, and held onto him like a floatation device, and kissed the back of his neck, and fallen asleep wrapped up in him.

"James, I'm in love with you," he said. "I really... I mean it."

James shifted. His hand moved, just barely, on Frank's hip. "Oh," he said. Then, quieter: "Oh."

Somewhere behind them, a dog snuffled in its sleep. Frank stepped back and pulled James with him, led him up the stairs and into the bedroom he shared with Danika, where they both collapsed on the unmade bed, caught up in each other. This was it, Frank thought. This was how to do the work. This was how to create what they had with one another, over and over, better and better. He pulled James towards him and kissed him, and whispered "I love you" into his parted lips on every inhale.

James bent to touch his damp mouth to Frank's neck, the spot under his ear just above the scorpion tail. He tightened his arms around Frank and held him there, and even as they moved against each other, he wouldn't stop holding him.

The distance between Los Angeles and New York spooled out into the still evening. Frank lay beside James and contemplated the distant skyline, the flight west he’d need to book. The things that could wait, would surely keep for the morning.

“I love you,” he said, again. Because he could.

James gathered him closer in his arms. “I love you, too, Frankie.”

 

_fin._


End file.
